The robots have landed!

 What a lovely day! The sun's shining, it's almost warm outside, and I saw on Facebook a couple of days ago that the Golden Orbit comic fair is in Birmingham today, so I went along to see what was on sale...

These things have been going on since I was very young, and the little A5 flyers have always been in exactly the same format - the whole thing is very nostalgic! And what's more, there's always some treasure to be found in the many cardboard boxes full of comics being sold there - but today, I actually found EXACTLY the kind of thing I'd gone there hoping to get! New 'reading copies' of early Transformers comics from a 20p box! Including a copy of no. 2 that's superior to the one I've already got!

That's a great cover, by John Ridgway. I do love the little girl resolutely playing with her doll and paying no attention to the giant robots marching towards her! It's true - Transformers were very emphatically "boys' toys" in those days.

The original owner of these comics (2, 4, 5, 7 and 8) has punched holes in them to keep them in a ring binder, but that's not really a problem, because these comics had very wide white margins around the artwork, so the holes mostly don't affect it. Most importantly, this copy has the centrespread poster still intact! My other copy for some reason has the right hand half of it cut out.

This is another great example of how the British comic adapted the American source material (I assume everyone reading this has already read and enjoyed my excessive posting about Planet Terry in recent weeks). In the American version of Transformers #1, this double-page spread is part of the story - the British comic takes the pages out of sequence to put them in the centrespread, blacks out the two story panels at the top of the first page and (most fascinatingly) rewrites all the speech bubbles! They're replaced with more legible typewriting, and convey the same basic information, but often in slightly different words. Here's the American original for comparison:

The new copy of this comic I bought today isn't entirely complete, though - the original owner has cut out a picture of Ravage's roaring face from page 20!

Lucky I've still got that other copy, so I can assemble a complete story! I wonder what the previous owner did with that picture. Probably stuck it to the front of a school book, or maybe a private diary to scare off intruders!

Well worth 20p of anyone's money!